It was this vigor, applied to every aspect of his life, which gave him his first, and perhaps most famous, quirk. He had a mathematical dispute with a former (and later reconciled) friend and fellow noble from the Parsberg family, one which could not be settled mathematically at the time. So, as was typical for brash young men of that day, the two decided to let God pick the winner by way of a duel. The fight occurred two days after the challenge, at night, and in it suffered a brutal stroke that carved off the bridge of his nose. This became the genesis of his interest in alchemy, and throughout his life Tycho continued to fashion ever more skillful replacement noses from different mixtures of gold, silver, and brass. It’s said that by the end, his creations were so perfect that only those who were looking for the disfigurement could notice it.

Eventually, however, the young Brahe began to settle — a bit. Following the death of his uncle, he successfully petitioned another of his father’s brothers to help him build a laboratory and observatory in Herrevad Abbey. In the lab, he pioneered a new method of making paper, a move that made him considerable wealth — not that he needed it. Still, Brahe remained a relatively low-profile noble until his stargazing led him to notice a brilliant new member of the constellation Cassiopeia: Stella Nova, “the new star”, which shone brighter than Venus where no light had been just weeks before. We now know that what he observed, taking meticulous notes for the year and a half it remained in the sky, was a supernova.

One of Brahe’s own entries about the location of his new, brilliant feature of the sky.

At the time, the prevailing opinion was that the universe beyond the orbit of the moon was static and unchanging, a nearly literal celestial orrery. The old guard and the new assumed Brahe’s Stella Nova was a tailless comet. However, Brahe was a student of the ancient astronomers, and knew that the issue could be settled with a rather simple assay: parallax, the difference in observed position based on the location of the observer. The simplest form of parallax exists between your two eyes; hold a finger close to your face and open each eye independently to see its effect, then do the same thing looking at an object further away to see how distance mitigates the effect. It was possible to see the effects of parallax on the moon, which is relatively near, and even on other planets. However, Stella Nova exhibited no parallax at all; it was further away than anything in our solar system.

Brahe’s discovery shot him to fame in a culture that was increasingly obsessed with the heavens. Edgar Allen Poe’s epic poem Al Aaraaf was based off of it, identifying the new celestial object as the Islamic conception of purgatory. Brahe spent a few years lecturing and publishing smaller astronomical observations, beginning what would be a lifelong quest to map the heavens with incredible accuracy. He pioneered several new versions of astronomical instruments, pursuing a level of precision demanded by nobody but himself, obeying orders that came only from within. King Frederick the II certainly was not the source of his seeming need to always pursue a more and more accurate view of the stars.

He quickly became known as the country’s foremost expert on astronomical measurements, but was in fact that best in the world. Brahe was obsessed with measurement, building the world’s first tables to try to systematically account for factors like the refraction of light as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere. He pioneered today’s somewhat neurotic approach to science, insisting on honest appraisals of error percentages and possible ranges for calculated figures.